The New YorkerModify

It was the second night of the year, and Rosa González was watching her favorite television show, “La Ruleta de la Suerte.” Onscreen, contestants raced to solve word puzzles, spinning the wheel of fortune and following clues about Christmas carols. After a while, Rosa told her niece Griselda that she was going to bed, but she quickly came back, unable to rest without knowing the end. At eighty years old, mind games helped her stay sharp.

Rosa had spent most of her life in Catia La Mar, a small port city on Venezuela’s central coast. Her house by the water had been where family and friends gathered to celebrate baptisms and weddings. During the pandemic, Rosa’s memory had started to fade, so Griselda and her siblings had brought her to an apartment that they shared nearby. Griselda, a preschool teacher, slept in one room, her brothers Wilman and Wilfredo in another. Rosa slept on a pullout bed in a room with Jimmy, Griselda’s nineteen-year-old son. The constant company seemed to erase all traces of her dementia, Griselda told me. Rosa went everywhere with the family and insisted on helping her as she swept the floors and washed the dishes.

After the show ended, Rosa wished her niece good night. Griselda stayed up later, scrolling on her phone. “Two minutes after I finally lay down, I felt a missile coming toward us,” she told me. “I don’t know how, I just sensed it.” She rushed into the hallway and watched as the projectile, which had pierced through the bathroom wall, landed in Rosa and Jimmy’s room, erupting in flames. The blast sent Griselda flying into the living room, where she crashed amid the rubble. Ears ringing, she scanned the dark for her son and found him standing on the bed. “I could only see his red eyes,” she said. “He was covered in dust, head to toe.” Jimmy was crying for her: “Mamá, ayúdame, ayúdame.”

Griselda tried to keep him from panicking. “Mom, why did this happen to us?” Jimmy kept asking. Meanwhile, Wilman and Wilfredo were trying to help Rosa, who was lying on the floor, crushed by a washing machine. They managed to free her and hoist her onto a chair. The old woman was having trouble breathing. Still, she tried to calm Jimmy. “Don’t worry, mijo,” Griselda heard her say. “We’ll make it out of this one.”

The brothers brought Rosa to a medical clinic down the street. Meanwhile, Griselda and Jimmy sought refuge at an open lot behind the apartment building, where some neighbors were gathering. Eight of the structure’s sixteen apartments had been destroyed, their side walls blown up. “Is anyone alive?” the neighbors shouted.

Their voices reached the closet where Jesús Linares, a firefighter, was hiding with his sixteen-year-old daughter Yoliangel and his eighty-five-year-old mother, Jesucita. The explosion had shattered the windows of their apartment, one floor above Griselda’s, and covered them in shards of glass. Blood flowed from a cut above Jesús’s left eye, and his mother had small wounds throughout her body. Once Jesús recognized his neighbors were calling, he ventured into the remnants of the apartment, telling his daughter to follow. Seeing the night sky where there used to be walls, Yoliangel started screaming. “Hija, you are fortitude,” Jesús said to assure her.

As Yoliangel guided her grandmother down the stairs of the building, Jesús went to check on Tibisay Suárez, an eighty-year-old woman who lived next door. Tibisay had Alzheimer’s and no family in town, so the neighbors took turns caring for her. When Jesús entered the apartment, he found her sitting in a pool of blood. “There was a gash across her forehead, temple to temple, down to the skull,” he told me. He tore an old bedsheet to dress Tibisay’s wounds and put on her shoes, so she would not cut her feet.

Other neighbors brought Tibisay to the clinic where Rosa was being treated, while Jesús and his family fled to a relative’s house, near a Venezuelan Navy base. Sitting in the dark, they were rattled by another wave of explosions. The base, less than a mile from the apartments, appears to have been the real target of the U.S. attacks in Catia La Mar. “What we wanted, more than anything, was for the sun to rise,” Jesús said.

Griselda and Jimmy, still in the parking lot, decided to seek refuge at the clinic. They had been there for less than half an hour when doctors came out to deliver the news: Rosa was dead.

Catia La Mar is separated from Caracas by mountains more than nine thousand feet tall, but residents of the capital had a similarly long night. American aircraft bombed multiple locations around the city, including airports, military bases, and transmission towers. After the last bomb dropped, the valley fell silent. Then, at 5:21 A.M., Donald Trump announced that President Nicolás Maduro had been captured, and some neighborhoods of Caracas broke out in cheers.

Later that day, I texted a friend in the city to ask about casualties. “I’m going to be very honest with you,” she said. “No one here is talking about the dead.” There were more pressing matters, such as fixing broken windows and stocking up on nonperishables. And though the evening had been frightening and the present was uncertain, many Venezuelans felt relieved: the person most responsible for the country’s descent into misery and despotism was gone, and would finally face justice; the regime that had governed the country for twenty-seven years was beginning to crack. If there were victims, they were probably complicit, and in any case, there was always a price to pay.

Hours after the attacks, the defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, stated that the Venezuelan government was gathering information about the victims, but whatever it found did not become public. Trump ended up being the first leader to disclose casualties, telling reporters that Maduro had been guarded by Cuban agents, many of whom had been killed by U.S. forces. By that afternoon, reports had begun to circulate that there were dozens of new patients in Caracas’s military hospitals.

The following day, Padrino López conceded that much of Maduro’s defense team had died, without offering details. A government document listing fifteen fatalities in the battalion that guarded the President was leaked to local journalists, who also reported an additional ten deaths. Among them was one civilian victim, still unnamed.

By then, reports of Cuban officers killed in Caracas had begun to circulate on the island. On social media, residents of Río Cauto mourned Fernando Báez Hidalgo, a young lieutenant whose passing was described as “a pain that multiplies itself.” Unable to limit the spread of information, the Cuban President, Miguel Díaz-Canel, announced that thirty-two members of the country’s armed forces and its Interior Ministry had died during the U.S. attack. Later that night, Venezuela’s acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, shared her condolences.

Stephen Miller, the U.S. homeland-security adviser, boasted about the Cubans’ deaths during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper the next day. “What our Special Forces encountered when they did that daring midnight assault into Caracas were armed Cuban guards, and they sustained massive numbers of casualties,” he said. When Tapper asked about civilian deaths, Miller claimed that there had not been any: “Every single kill was an enemy kill.” A Pentagon official later told The New Yorker that the U.S. strikes had been “precisely planned to achieve operational objectives” and that civilians had not been “intentionally targeted.”

By the time Miller went on CNN, Venezuelan journalists had identified two civilian victims: Rosa González and Johana Rodríguez Sierra. Originally from a town near Cartagena, in neighboring Colombia, Johana had spent most of her life in Caracas. For decades, she had looked after a wealthy family’s estate in the mountains south of the city, where she lived with her daughter Ana Corina. Just up the hill was a group of telecommunication antennas, some of which are believed to belong to the Venezuelan military. Their caretaker, Carlos Bracho, lived in a small yellow house on site and had been there for even longer than Johana.

The towers were one of the first targets attacked by the U.S. on January 3rd. Around two in the morning, there was an explosion, followed by the sound of an antenna crashing down. Johana and Ana Corina were awakened by the blast, a cousin told the Colombian newspaper El Universal. Johana, wanting to know what had happened, decided to head for the towers, and Ana Corina followed her. As they drew close, a second bomb fell, toppling another antenna, which landed squarely on the yellow house. Carlos’s nephew, who was there that night, told the Times that he saw shell fragments hit Johana across her chest. Ana Corina was also wounded, but she managed to call the cousin. “They are killing us!” the cousin heard her cry.

Carlos helped bring the woman to the nearest clinic, someone close to all of them said. Johana, bleeding profusely, died in transit. “On the one hand, I thank God that Carlos is alive,” the person told me. “On the other, I ask God why he took Johana.”

Missiles also hit the residential neighborhood of La Boyera, down the mountain from the transmission towers. One fell in seventy-four-year-old Arturo Berti’s garden, next to the town house that he shares with his wife and sister, who are also in their seventies. A security camera captured the bomb as it exploded, setting the surrounding trees on fire and splintering the windows of neighboring apartments, including the one where Ana María Campos, fifty-one, lives with her seventy-year-old mother, Gracia.

When Ana María woke up, there was a big hole next to her bed. Everything was covered in dust, including her eyes, so she had to feel her way through the house. There were holes in the kitchen wall, the living-room floor, the ceiling of her mother’s room. Ana María called out to her dad for help, even though he had died eight years earlier. “In the darkest moment of your life, you reach for that connection with a loved one,” she explained. Nearly everyone in her family has either died or left the country, leaving her and Gracia alone in Caracas. “Little by little, we settle into this feeling of having been abandoned by life,” Ana María told me.

By January 6th, the death count had risen to fifty-eight: thirty-two Cuban agents, twenty-four Venezuelan soldiers, Rosa, and Johana. In a televised visit to western Caracas that evening, Delcy Rodríguez decreed seven days of national mourning. “The images of lifeless bodies have pierced my soul, but I know that they were martyred for the supreme values of the Republic,” she told the cameras. The armed forces held ceremonies for officers killed during the U.S. attack. Its social-media channels were flooded with videos of wooden caskets draped in the yellow, blue, and red of the Venezuelan flag, set to the opening verse of a song by Alí Primera: “Those who die for life cannot be called dead.”

“This is a regime that loves propaganda,” the Venezuelan journalist Roberto Deniz told me. “And if there is something the revolution has always taken pride in, it’s its soldiers.” Yet the identities of many of the fallen officers had been shrouded in secrecy. An Instagram post by a general from the state of Aragua appeared to be the first public notice that the Presidential guard Eduardo Peraza Moreno had perished, four days after the fact. His name couldn’t be found on any lists or headlines. The singer Claudio David Balcane, who told me that he was a childhood friend of Eduardo, said it was as if a ghost had died: “He was twenty-eight years old. He came to this world and left it, and no one found out.”

Ronna Rísquez, a journalist who has spent years exposing violent deaths in Venezuela, speculated that the government had avoided publishing a list of victims because it was reluctant “to recognize the staggering number of Cuban officers tasked with Maduro’s custody.” Rísquez is the co-founder and director of Monitor de Víctimas, an investigative platform that provides comprehensive data on violence in the country. Between 2017 and 2024, her team documented more than six thousand homicides, two-fifths of which had been committed by government forces. This month, the reporters have been focussed on exposing the human cost of the U.S. attack. By January 18th, they had verified eighty deaths, including those of the thirty-two Cubans.

The presence of Cuban military and security officers in Venezuela was an open secret. Two agreements signed in 2008, whose details were later published by Reuters, granted Cuba the power to train Venezuelan soldiers and intelligence agents and restructure much of the country’s security apparatus. Still, both governments have consistently dodged questions about an overseas deployment or flat-out denied it. In a 2019 interview, Maduro suggested that there were no Cuban military officials stationed in the country, and declared that everyone in his security ring was Venezuelan. Díaz-Canel’s announcement that Cuban agents had died in Venezuela, and his government’s subsequent publication of the men’s names and ranks, broke decades of precedent.

The two most senior men on the list, Colonel Humberto Roca and Colonel Lázaro Rodríguez, were identified in official obituaries as members of the Cuban Interior Ministry’s personal security division. Rodríguez had “organized the protection” of the island’s leaders, while Roca had held “maximum responsibility” for Fidel Castro’s safety. The majority of victims from the armed forces, however, were said to have been rank-and-file soldiers. A relative of Luis Hidalgo, who appeared on the list as a fifty-seven-year-old soldier, told the Cuban journalist Mario Pentón that Hidalgo was a civilian, and had been working as a chauffeur. “He did not go to Venezuela to defend a homeland, or to defend anything at all; he went there to help his family,” the relative said.

In Venezuela, the demise of military officers elicited little sympathy, and that of Cubans even less. “The only deaths we are saddened by are those of civilians,” one man declared on Instagram. Everyone else, another one wrote, “had been on the wrong side of history.” The reports by Monitor de Víctimas prompted many users to enumerate the victims of Maduro’s regime. Compared with the eight million Venezuelans who had fled the country, the nearly twenty thousand who had been detained for political reasons, the thousands who had been extrajudicially executed, and the hundreds who had been tortured, the deaths of a few dozen people seemed of little significance.

On January 10th, Rísquez’s team identified two more civilian victims: Lenín Ramírez Osorio and Eduardo Soto Libre, who had been previously listed as military officials, were actually air-traffic controllers. The men had been doing a shift at the Óscar Machado Zuloaga airport, an hour south of Caracas, when the U.S. bombed the area. Lenín had offered to drive Eduardo. A few minutes after his white car left the airport, it appears to have been hit by an explosive. Before dawn, several men passed the vehicle and stopped to film the wreckage. Only the chassis remained, engulfed by flames. Coming near, one of the passersby made out two elongated forms, the color of charcoal. They were Lenín and Eduardo.

When the videos were shared on social media, many Venezuelans responded with skepticism. Some doubted that the car had been bombed or that anyone had been killed. Others speculated that the passengers were connected to the government. Two sisters close to Lenín fought to set the record straight. “They worked at the airport,” one of them explained. “The driver was my friend, and now he is gone.” Despite their efforts, many brushed off the men’s passing as “collateral damage.” Eventually, the sisters stopped responding, and their father took over. “Today, Lenín’s family and friends cry for him,” he wrote. “This is not about politics. Please, respect other people’s pain.” ♦

You might be surprised to learn that someone is determining whether or not your appliances work on a day-to-day basis. That your fridge isn’t just malfunctioning because of some electrical failure. It’s because of a person, and I am that person, and your appliances are the tools with which I craft my art, and make your life a living hell.

It’s wonderful to finally meet you, or it’s terrible to meet you. Which is it? Who knows. That’s not how I operate. There is no rhyme or reason to any of my actions. This makes life exciting for you—not in the way a surprise party is exciting but in the way that makes you late for the party so that you accidentally ruin it for the person you were supposed to surprise, because your oven stopped working.

When you put your clothes in the washing machine, you do so with the expectation that they will be washed. Well, that’s your first mistake. Why do you think you deserve clean clothes? When the clothes emerge and don’t have any clumps of coagulated detergent acting as a horrifying adhesive between them, do you even thank me? No, you don’t. But please don’t take this to mean that if you started thanking me, you would get clean clothes. I’m actually not looking for anything from you when I make the washing machine work. I just do it when I want to. It’s an exercise in control, in a world in which control is hard to come by (as evidenced by the fact that you don’t control when your washing machine washes your clothes).

Now, the dishwasher is a different story. I actually do control that in a more standardized way—by making sure it doesn’t function twenty-five per cent of the time some months, and then fifty per cent of the time others. I like to reserve the latter option for months with thirty-one days. Doing this requires, mathematically, more effort from me, but it brings me joy, and with everything going on these days it’s important to do things you love. I do maintain a little flexibility with what goes wrong either one-fourth or half of the time. Perhaps the dishwasher pod is never released inside the machine. Or the dishes are still soaking wet after “drying” is complete. Maybe the knives get rusty. Maybe they get flipped blade side up. I have plans to figure out a way to transfer spaghetti sauce from a plate to a coffee mug on the upper rack. Exciting times.

Speaking of, it’s time for me to turn your gas stove off. No, no—not all the way off. Just off enough that you hear a “Tell-Tale Heart”-esque ticking from across the room, tormenting you. The flame will never ignite, so you have nothing to fear, really. Just the bomb-like ticking. Also, you can’t make soup tonight.

While my primary domain is the sudden-demise-and-resurrection cycle of your appliances, I have some extracurricular hobbies, too. That’s right—the nail that’s sticking out of your wooden floorboard—the one you keep hammering in? I’m clawing it back out, baby! The gophers that have made your back yard the Penn Station of the gopher world? Somehow, also me!

I make nothing but discordant decisions. I don’t simply throw caution to the wind, I punt it into a tornado of fire, which you’ll never know is coming because I’ve disabled the fire alarm. I live every day like it’s your last. I have one god, and her name is Chaos.

But, please, go ahead and try unplugging and replugging again. ♦

Paper and clocks are associated with first wedding anniversaries, or so the gift guides say. As the United States reaches the one-year mark in its increasingly dysfunctional and abuse-laden political marriage with Donald J. Trump, though the President has made it clear that he will take almost any sort of gift—even, and maybe especially, someone else’s Nobel Peace Prize medal. The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado offered hers up to him last week, in a large gold-colored frame, ready for hanging. Although something of a pathetic gesture, given that the Trump Administration seems to have cut a deal with the remnants of Nicolás Maduro’s government (while Maduro himself is in a Brooklyn jail), it did earn her an upgrade. After Maduro’s arrest, Trump said that Machado was “a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect”; post-medal bestowal, she was “a wonderful woman” and her gift “a wonderful gesture of mutual respect.” Those words might even get her somewhere, if only she had control over a lot of oil reserves. But clocks can make good gifts, too. After a group of Swiss businessmen arrived at the White House in November, bearing a desk clock in the form of an oversized Rolex, the country got a break on tariffs.

Those who aren’t trying to please the President might still keep clocks in mind this January 20th, because the country is in a countdown. Three hundred and sixty-five days of Trump means a thousand and ninety-six to go, including a leap year. (That’s not counting all the Trump first-term days, of course; this is a tragedy of remarriage.) We have aged so much in Trump years that the Biden Administration can feel much longer ago than it was. The brief era of Elon Musk running around the White House may now seem like a fever dream—he and Trump seem to have an off-and-on thing—but hundreds of thousands of people lost their jobs in his wake or otherwise had their lives changed irrevocably, including recipients of U.S. aid around the world. On January 1st, millions of Americans lost their health-care subsidies. Immigrants, even legal ones, live with a new level of fear. So, too, do many academics, scientists, and even lawyers. There’s an undercurrent of political violence that wasn’t present in the same way a year ago.

Crucially, there are now only two hundred and eighty-seven days until the midterm elections, which have at least the potential to significantly change the balance of power in Washington. Republicans control both houses of Congress, but the margins are slim: 218–213 in the House of Representatives, giving the G.O.P. a hold so tenuous that the Majority Whip, Tom Emmer, has reportedly indicated that he won’t excuse absences for matters other than “life or death”; the margin in the Senate is 53–47. The entire House is up for reëlection, and it is more than plausible that the Democrats will prevail there; taking the Senate, where thirty-five seats will be contested, will be much tougher, though not impossible. Even before November, there will be special elections for four vacant House seats, including the one held, until recently, by the Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her spinning away from the Trump majority—spurred by, of all things, the Jeffery Epstein case—may be an indication that this Administration is decaying more quickly than the calendar alone would indicate.

For at least some other Republicans, at this one-year juncture, the breaking point may be Trump’s uncannily serious talk of buying or seizing Greenland, a territory of our NATO ally Denmark. Some MAGA types love the idea, but, as Politico reported, the Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, said last week that there was “certainly not an appetite for some of the options that have been talked about or considered.” That statement came before Trump’s announcement, this past Saturday, that he will be imposing tariffs on Denmark and seven other European countries “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.” Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, has raised the possibility of invoking the War Powers Act, a tool that Congress has for reining in the President. Not incidentally, Tillis has said that he will not seek reëlection this year. His seat is open, and one of the top targets for Democrats, who have a strong candidate in former Governor Roy Cooper.

North Carolina matters a great deal, because fewer than a dozen Senate seats are in contention at all, and only a handful are close calls; the others are in states that are solidly red or blue. One is in Minnesota, where Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat, has decided not to run again. That race, in that state, is a reminder that, though calendars are crucial, any calculation can be upset in the seconds it takes, for example, for an ICE agent to open fire into an S.U.V. The situation in Minneapolis is precarious, with Trump threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act and put troops on the streets. “If I needed it, I’d use it,” he told reporters on Friday, on his way to Mar-a-Lago. “It’s very powerful.” His Justice Department is reportedly investigating Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz for impeding immigration enforcement, both of whom have described the move as an attempt to intimidate them. (This past year has certainly been very different for Walz, who was Kamala Harris’s running mate, than it would have been.)

Depending on what Trump does next, Minneapolis may become the scene not only of passing chaos but of a breakdown in the relationship between Americans and their government. Precisely because of those stakes, it is worrisome that two of the leading Democratic contenders for Smith’s seat—Representative Angie Craig, who has a reputation as a centrist, and Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, who is more aligned with the Party’s progressive wing—have been quarrelling, in personal terms, about whose response to the ICE actions and to a social-service-fraud scandal involving the Somali community is better. The intraparty divisions that the two women represent are profound and will play out in primary races at every level. One question is which kind of Democrat has the best chance in November. The answer may differ state to state; one of the more endangered Democratic seats is that of Senator Jon Ossoff, in Georgia.

A judicial clock is running down alongside the electoral one. Trump has issued two hundred and twenty-eight executive orders—eight more than in his entire first term and sixty-six more than Joe Biden did in his four years—along with other dubious actions and pronouncements. These orders have been met by a stream of lawsuits—hundreds of them, by the A.P.’s count—which should keep coming. (Paper is a traditional first-anniversary gift, after all.) The A.P. even brought its own case, Associated Press v. Budowich, after it was barred from the White House press room for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. It’s hard, with Trump, to separate the absurd from the catastrophic. Between now and July, the Supreme Court will hear arguments or issue rulings on a number of the most significant cases occasioned by Trump’s actions, including his attempt to do away with birthright citizenship. On Wednesday, the day after Trump’s Inaugural anniversary, the Court will hear arguments in a case over his attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors; Jerome Powell, the chair of the Fed, recently released a video statement saying that he was being criminally investigated in retaliation for not setting interest rates where the President wanted them.

When Trump was inaugurated, there were fears that he might get three or even four more chances to name a Justice to the Supreme Court. It’s a small blessing that, with a year down, he hasn’t had any yet. Still, one Justice, Clarence Thomas, may be counting days for his own reasons. Thomas is currently the fifth-longest-serving Justice ever, having taken his seat on October 23, 1991. By mid-May, he will have moved up three spots, to be the second-longest-serving. Will that be enough for him to decide to retire while Trump can still appoint his successor? (It would take until April, 2028, for him to pass William O. Douglas for the No. 1 spot. Trump, depending on the makeup of the Senate, may have fewer options to get a nominee confirmed by then.) And Thomas, who is seventy-seven years old, is one of four septuagenarians on the Court. The others are Samuel Alito, seventy-five; Sonia Sotomayor, seventy-one; and John Roberts, seventy.

There are other countdowns. On February 3rd, about three hundred and fifty thousand Haitians are due to lose their Temporary Protected Status, though some may be able to find a different route to stay in the U.S. legally. The Administration has also cancelled, or is trying to cancel, T.P.S. for hundreds of thousands of people from other countries, including Venezuela, Somalia, Nepal, and Nicaragua. There is ongoing litigation, but people with T.P.S., which is meant for migrants from countries in crisis, and a related immigration status, called humanitarian parole, are especially vulnerable, because both Biden and his predecessors relied on the discretion of the executive branch to extend them that relief in the first place. Trump is, in effect, attempting to make use of the same discretion, in reverse, but without regard to the fact that many of these migrants are well settled in their communities, with jobs, neighbors, and children who are citizens, or to the conditions in their home countries. One question is whether he’s done so in an illegitimately arbitrary way, but a majority of the Justices may back him up; they have already stayed certain lower-court attempts to put some of these cancellations on hold. Cruelty, sadly, is not necessarily unconstitutional, at least not in the eyes of the Court.

Indeed, if we’ve learned anything about our constitutional structure in the past year, it’s that the Presidency has, over time, been given too much power. The abdication of the other branches, particularly Congress, to the executive, on matters ranging from military action and surveillance to the economy and immigration, did not begin with Trump. The corollary is that, while Trump can break many things—he can seize a foreign leader, he can scuttle alliances, he can derail lives, and he can make Americans even angrier at one another—whoever comes next will have a lot of power to undo his damage and rebuild. Even he doesn’t have enough control over his party or the courts to keep the next elections from happening, even if having a fair election in every district will require vigilance. (It always does, to some degree.) By that same measure, a President J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio could make the hole we are in much deeper. The Democrats have only so much time to figure out who their own standard-bearer will be. That said, the Party should not move so quickly as to foreclose a truly contested primary, which would have been valuable in 2024.

But that election will be in 2028, and here we are, still in 2026, still with Trump—and still with time to mobilize for the midterms. What Congress has given to Presidents it can also begin to take away. It will take years and a galvanized counter-majority to truly restore the balance, but even just winning one of the chambers back would provide a significant brake on the MAGA vision of executive power. And people at every level, from parents without legal status to the governors of states, can keep bringing the Administration into court. 2026 will be the year for pushing back against Trump with a ballot in one hand and a lawsuit in the other. There is no going back to how things were before January 20, 2025, but there may yet be a better way forward. ♦

The ray-finned saltwater fish known as the bonito is also called, by some fishermen I know, the tiger tuna—a nickname that refers to its taxonomy (bonito and tuna are in the same family) and to its iridescent blue-green stripes. Early one morning in late December, the sky was overcast on the waters off the coast of Dana Point, in Southern California’s Orange County, and still the scales of a thrashing six-pound bonito, reeled in by the chef Junya Yamasaki, shimmered brilliantly. Yamasaki, who is fifty years old, tall, and slender, with long black hair that he wears in a bun, detached the fish from the line. Then, with practiced ease, he used one hand to hold it by its gills and the other to drive a small metal stake between its eyes and directly into its brain—a technique known in Japan as ike jime. The bonito’s body twitched until Yamasaki slid a thin metal wire down the column of its spinal cord, a second step called shinkei jime, which arrests its nervous system.

The method is considered significantly more humane than the standard alternatives for killing a fish (thwacking it on the head, letting it suffocate), and is analogous to halal and kosher butchery, which both require that animals be slaughtered with a swift, decisive cut to the throat. It also results in fish that tastes better and stays fresh significantly longer. “The process brings out the best characteristic of every species,” Yamasaki told me—a firm silkiness for white fish, a clean acidity for tuna. It works in part by stemming the flood of stress hormones and other chemicals that a fish’s body begins to release upon capture, staving off rigor mortis and the stink of decay. Conner Mitchell, a restaurateur and a commercial fisherman, and the captain of the Jamaica Day—the small pilothouse boat we were fishing on—was impressed the first time he saw Yamasaki do it. “I’m looking at a fish that would have been stiff, now as flexible as tissue paper,” Mitchell said.

In Japan, you can assume that the fish at any good restaurant met its end by way of ike and shinkei jime; in the U.S., the same is true at restaurants offering catch imported from Tokyo’s famed Toyosu Market. Among the fishermen of Southern California, the practice can largely be traced to Yamasaki, whose evangelism has quietly transformed the local seafood supply. On the deck of the Jamaica Day, Mitchell and an array of other energetic restaurant-industry dudes in their thirties—all of whom learned the technique under Yamasaki’s tutelage—set up rods, checked the boat’s radar, and gleefully spotted clusters of birds diving in the distance, which signalled that schools of bonito swam beneath them. Whenever a line began to jerk, the group exploded in a joyful chorus. Then the men took turns reeling the fish in, and putting them out of their misery.

Twice, I reeled in a bonito myself—a process that I found surprisingly intimate, just me and an invisible squirming weight at the other end of the line. Both times, I struggled as I turned the crank, heart pounding, almost certain that I wouldn’t succeed, until I caught sight of a silver flash at the water’s surface. Then Danny Miller or Cole Moser—a chef and a bartender, respectively—would pull it on board. As Miller gutted one particularly beautiful specimen, tossing its organs into the spray before slipping it into a slurry of ice and salt water, he pointed out that, because of the ike and shinkei jime, the fish had retained its vibrant color. If it had died slowly, it would have already gone dull and gray.

A full week later, when I unwrapped the bonito fillets that Yamasaki had sent me home with, I was amazed to find the skin undiminished, the flesh a rosy pink. I’d grown used to being disappointed by fish from the supermarket, its flavor so often muddy or bitter, with the occasional bracing whiff of ammonia. The bonito smelled barely of the ocean, clean and faintly salty. Following Yamasaki’s instructions, I seasoned each fillet generously before flash-searing it on a ferociously hot cast-iron pan, then sliced it into thick chunks to dip into soy sauce. The flesh was sweet, a little tart, and supple, like a piece of ripe fruit.

Several times in the past few months, when I’ve called Yamasaki on the phone—we met last year, at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market—I’ve reached him in the middle of a long drive. About once a week, he hops into his crimson 1997 Jeep and travels several hours from Los Angeles to forage for mushrooms or to dive for shellfish, at locations that he prefers not to disclose, accompanied by his dogs, Artichoke and Chanterelle. Chanterelle, a large and spirited three-year-old Belgian Malinois mix, has a challenging temperament; on the boat, Yamasaki pulled up a pant leg to reveal a big, gnarly scab where she’d bitten his calf. “I think one of the reasons she’s crazy is because, during the tuna season, I give her all the trimmings,” he joked—at least one of his fishing buddies has gotten mercury poisoning. “I’m a zero-waste chef, you know?”

As a kid, Yamasaki, who grew up near Osaka, went fishing with his father. It was only when he became a chef—a career he stumbled into while putting himself through art school, in Paris—that he taught himself ike and shinkei jime, which are associated with the Akashi Strait, a famous fishery not far from his home town. As the executive chef at Koya, an udon bar in London, Yamasaki cooked live eels, whose bodies could remain jumpy and unwieldy even once their heads had been chopped off. After learning how to paralyze the spinal cord on an eel, he found handling other fish to be easy. “Ask a vet—it’s much more difficult to do an operation on a Chihuahua than a Doberman,” he told me.

In 2018, Yamasaki moved to L.A. to open a Japanese restaurant, which evolved from a pandemic-era food truck to an idiosyncratic izakaya, called Yess, in the Arts District. (After his current lease ends later this month, he will open a cheekily named pop-up, Fuck Yess, while he looks for a new location.) From the start, he knew that he wanted to serve seafood, and that he wanted to commit to using local ingredients, as he’d done at Koya. Between London and L.A., he spent a few months at a Zen temple back in Japan, where practitioners grew their own vegetables and rice. “They pursue this as kind of a mission to learn about life,” he told me. He was dismayed that the best seafood he could access in L.A. was imported from Japan: “It’s fresher than the fish, ironically, from Santa Barbara, which takes a couple of days, sometimes a week.” He researched species native to California’s waters—opaleye, calico bass, moray eel—only to discover that most weren’t even sold commercially. “And then I found this YouTube video of somebody spearfishing, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is what you have to do,’ ” he told me.

Many of this era’s chefs claim to be obsessed with seasonality and local sourcing; for Yamasaki, it’s a life style, an all-encompassing pursuit. After taking swimming lessons, he learned to spearfish, and to free dive, so that he could gather fish, sea urchin, and lobster by hand. Without a commercial license, he wouldn’t be able to sell what he caught; he realized that if he wanted a steady supply of the best possible fish for Yess, he’d need some local fishermen to take up ike and shinkei jime. Most of his cold e-mails and Instagram D.M.s went unanswered. Finally, Eric Hodge, an auto mechanic in Ojai who’d been fishing commercially for a few years, agreed to take him out on the water for a demonstration. Hodge was amused that Yamasaki was prone to seasickness. “I think he threw up all day,” Hodge said, of their first fishing trip. But, after tasting what they’d caught and butchered, he was convinced that Yamasaki was on to something.

Yamasaki told Hodge that if they created a market for the product, and got other chefs and fishermen excited about the technique, Hodge could triple his revenue. (Hodge overshot this almost immediately.) Soon afterward, Yamasaki met Mitchell, who supplies seafood for his own restaurant, Dudley Market Venice. “What we learned, especially from Junya, was way more about the philosophy of why you’re doing it,” Mitchell said. “It’s not just ‘Run the wire down the fish.’ It’s about the fact that you’re trying to care this much from the second you take this fish’s life.” Within a few years, ike and shinkei jime became the gold standard for locally caught seafood in L.A. Among the prestigious restaurants to which Hodge sold his catch was Providence, in Hollywood, one of only two restaurants in the city to earn three Michelin stars.

In El Segundo, just north of Manhattan Beach, the founders of a startup called Seremoni have designed and manufactured a machine, the Poseidon, that performs an automated version of ike jime, with the goal of making high-quality fish more accessible. The company installs Poseidons, each about the size of a phone booth, on the boat decks of local fishermen, then purchases the catch at a premium. Each fish is slipped into a tubular opening of the machine, as if going in for an MRI, and then an A.I.-powered sensor determines where on its head to insert a mechanical spike. Restaurants, including Eleven Madison Park and Le Bernardin, in New York, have started serving what the company calls “Seremoni-grade” fish. Yamasaki himself serves the brand’s black cod.

Though I admire the ingenuity and idealism behind Seremoni, it was easy to see, on the Jamaica Day, what would be lost by delegating any part of the process to a robot. As we motored offshore in the morning, the brisk wind lashing our faces, we spotted a pair of sea lions dozing on the surface of the water; later, dolphins arced around us in every direction. Several times, at dusk, after the group had agreed to pack it in, a flash on the radar or a fresh flock of birds inspired Mitchell to whip the boat around and chase one more catch. When I remarked that the addictive thrill of deep-sea fishing seemed not unlike that of gambling, Mitchell laughed and said, “I think just as many people have lost their wives doing it.” As the sun set, he grew reflective. “The thing I’ll never get over is how there are so few people out here, and we all know each other,” he told me. “It’s the greatest place to be alone in L.A. I hope the TikTok kids never figure it out.” ♦

It’s 1917, and you’re Finnish. (Lucky you.) After six centuries of Swedish rule, and more than a hundred years as a grand duchy of Russia, your nation is finally on the brink of independence. To the south, Europe is tearing itself to bits in the First World War; to the east, there’s the Russian Revolution. Most of the art you’ve seen at this point is either second-rate or beats a patriotic drum—lakes and forests and scenes from the “Kalevala,” a national epic featuring some cosmic eggs and a drowned girl who turns into a fish. One afternoon, in the heart of Helsinki, you stumble into an art gallery and see a retrospective of a painter named Helene Schjerfbeck. It all feels familiar, but not. Here is a world where people read empty books in empty rooms, flesh is stretched tautly on the bone, and eyes are cold enough to freeze the light behind them. You’re not sure you like it, exactly. But of this much you’re certain: Finland has produced a modern painter.

The Helsinki exhibition drew around four thousand visitors, a record for the Finnish art world at the time. A local art historian, in his review, compared Schjerfbeck to Titian, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, and Beethoven. Notice the scramble of names there: a Renaissance master, two very different Baroque titans, and a German composer. The art historian was grasping at straws. A century later, we still are. The subject of “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck,” in the Met’s Lehman Wing, is a portrait painter seemingly uninterested in people, an artist of the “golden age” of Finnish art who isn’t associated with its goldenness, and a modernist you’d have trouble finding in almost any history of modernism. That’s also what makes her work tantalizingly great.

“The Door” (1884).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Finnish National Gallery / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Yehia Eweis

To become a famous Nordic painter, it helped to be born between 1860 and 1865. Hilma af Klint, Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, and Akseli Gallen-Kallela all understood this; so did Schjerfbeck, who arrived in 1862. As a child, she fell down some stairs and broke her hip. The injury left her with a permanent limp, creating an open invitation for every art historian and critic to psychologize her paintings as disguised self-portraits of suffering. Her father, a downwardly mobile civil servant, gave her pencils, paper, and crayons as she convalesced, and what started as art therapy turned into a calling. From an early age, she was plied with scholarships, travel grants, prizes, and exhibition opportunities. When she turned eighteen, she took a steamboat to Paris.

The Met show opens in the eighteen-eighties, when naturalism flowered in Parisian art schools. To see Schjerfbeck in peak naturalist mode, look up “A Boy Feeding His Little Sister” (1881); then dart up to the second floor of the museum, where Jules Bastien-Lepage’s “Joan of Arc” (1879) is on display. Note the square, almost pixelated brushwork and earthy palette Schjerfbeck adopted from Bastien-Lepage, who taught at the academy where Schjerfbeck took classes. This coarse, descriptive mode of painting was being used by the Third Republic for nation-building, uniting the motley cultures of France with an easy-to-chew visual language of freshly plowed fields, restaurant kitchens, and medical laboratories. I mention the nation-building because it’s what made naturalism such an exportable style, especially for a country like Finland, which was rushing to consolidate its identity overnight. In theory, Schjerfbeck was supposed to be one of Finland’s soldiers—she was in France on the dime of the Art Society and the senate—but her commitments were always more artistic than ideological.

“Self-Portrait with Black Background” (1915).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Finnish National Gallery / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Hannu Aaltonen

In 1883, Schjerfbeck travelled to Brittany, where her first coup of ingenuity arrived, with paintings like “Clothes Drying” (1883) and “The Door” (1884). By filtering the grammar of naturalism through a fine mesh strainer until all that remains are skeletal forms and eerie compositional croppings, Schjerfbeck forces your eye toward an occluded or trivial detail. “The Door” shows a chapel interior with a closed door, a smudge of light, and no signs of life, except for the fact that the vanishing point is low enough to put us in the eyes of a child or a goat. In paintings, doors tend to function as little narrative machines, producing expectation or action. But Schjerfbeck’s is a narrative dead end. It’s as if she took one of Pieter Jansz. Saenredam’s empty church interiors and shook it until even the emptiness fell out.

What helped Schjerfbeck ascend from naturalism into the modernist ether might surprise you: Old Master paintings. In the eighteen-nineties, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to St. Petersburg, Vienna, and Florence to reproduce famous pieces for its collection. While reverse engineering works by Velázquez, Holbein, and Fra Angelico, she started to revise her techniques, fiddling with tempera, gouache, watercolor, and charcoal, and roughing up her surfaces. Puvis de Chavannes, whom she’d met in Paris, had been imitating the faded and matte look of fresco. Schjerfbeck also liked the way Degas bleached his pastels to deaden their tone. By pushing against the varnished, slick look of academic painting, and sapping its color into a chalky haze, she could pierce the viewer with a feeling of antiquity and melancholic potency. Once the patina of fresco entered her work, it never left.

In 1902, Schjerfbeck and her mother, Olga, moved to a one-bedroom flat in Hyvinkää, a small rail hub about thirty-five miles from Helsinki. The rustlings of Post-Impressionism hadn’t made an impact on Schjerfbeck when she was in Paris, but suddenly Cézanne, Gauguin, and Whistler crashed into her work, partly thanks to French art magazines. In Schjerfbeck’s homemade modernism, subject, color, and space all tend toward the minimal. With Whistleresque pieces like “The Seamstress (The Working Woman),” from 1905, and the almost scary “The School Girl II (Girl in Black),” from 1908, her palette constricts to pale blacks, grays, whites, and tawny browns. Rounded shapes are flattened or approximated with broad planes, so that clothes aren’t worn by the figures so much as blocked on, like shadows. Schjerfbeck’s mature style doesn’t just use vague forms but rigorously militates against detail. Details can be chatty and overeager; they populate the eye with information, rather than allowing the mind to invent it. “Let us imply,” Schjerfbeck said.

By the time Schjerfbeck had her solo show in Helsinki in 1917, two men had joined her camp. One was Gösta Stenman, who served as Schjerfbeck’s gallerist and local champion; the other was Einar Reuter, a young forester and artist, who became her confidant and crush. “Einar Reuter (Study in Brown)” (1915-18), painted during the honeymoon phase of their friendship, shows how Schjerfbeck, at the height of her powers, chose to paint someone she admired. It’s bleaker than you would hope. Schjerfbeck uses the rough weave of the canvas to turn Reuter into a husk of himself, with an empty pair of brown eyes and a mangled ear. Don’t mistake the depressive air for his own. Schjerfbeck’s portraits are not about showing you a person’s appearance and essence but, rather, about taking them away. Her anti-portraits, at their best and most psychologically lacerating, remind you how painful it can be not to have access to another person’s inner life.

The major exception to Schjerfbeck’s downcast eyes and turned-away heads is her self-portraiture. I’ve kept it out of the picture until now because it seems to operate on a different time line, as if there were a small, hidden room that Schjerfbeck entered every decade or so, to find herself again. Of the forty-some self-portraits done between the eighteen-eighties and 1946, when she died, there are two remarkable clusters. The first set, from 1912 to 1915, shows Schjerfbeck in her fifties, her face milk white, her lips pinched and stern. In one from 1912, a few colored brushstrokes—gray-blue above the brow, icing pink on the cheeks, a flash of gold in the hair—threaten to burst the illusion of her face into dozens of little painted moments. It’s the kind of loose handiwork that would have made Velázquez jealous.

“The Tapestry” (1914-16).Art work by Helene Schjerfbeck / Courtesy Private Collection / Metropolitan Museum of Art; Photograph by Per Myrehed

The second cluster, from 1944 to 1945, includes some of the most bone-chilling self-portraits in the history of painting—more so than anything Rembrandt, Goya, van Gogh, or Kollwitz attempted. At the age of eighty-two, in a final sprint of twenty pieces, Schjerfbeck painted herself as a putrefying corpse, with enucleated eyes and goblin ears. There are touches of Munch’s screamer, Daumier’s withering caricatures, and Géricault’s dissected bodies. But more jarring than any of this is the lack of humanity that Schjerfbeck perceives in herself. In one portrait after another, you see her skull emerge from a bed of living flesh. It’s the closest an artist has come to painting herself from beyond the grave.

The “silence” of the exhibition’s title, along with the depressive tenor of the show, plays handily into our penchant for Scandinavian noir and age-old stereotypes about the Finns as a bunch of cold, miserable forest dwellers on the edge of civilization. For all her cosmopolitanism, Schjerfbeck didn’t do much to dispel this. She was unapologetically chilly and, like Munch, cultivated her suffering. “Poor my life would be without the grief,” she said. I’d suggest that the real Finnish story here is that of an artist who painted freely, without being absorbed into the ho-hum progression of European modernism or Finnish nationalism, and yet was well supported by the state in her key years of artistic development. That might not sound like the most electrifying reason to celebrate a painter, but you’re unlikely to get one as daring, rangy, and brilliant as Schjerfbeck without it. America should take note. ♦

On the Friday before Mother’s Day, LaMonica McIver, a first-term Democratic congresswoman from New Jersey, spent the morning handing out roses in the maternity ward of a hospital in Newark. Her next stop, a visit to Delaney Hall, a federal immigration jail in her district, promised to be a more sombre affair, but she was “on a high note,” McIver told me. “We thought it would be a smooth day.”

McIver arrived at Delaney Hall just before one o’clock. She was joining two other New Jersey Democrats—Bonnie Watson Coleman and Robert Menendez, Jr.—to tour the facility. Members of Congress are allowed by law to make unannounced visits to detention centers as part of their oversight responsibilities; the three lawmakers planned to look around inside, then hold a press conference. As they were waiting to enter, McIver needled Menendez about his plans for Mother’s Day. “What did you get your wife?” she asked him, and acted scandalized when he said he hadn’t yet bought anything. “Oh, my God,” McIver said. “You have less than forty-eight hours!”

The members knew the rules of touring immigration facilities: their staff couldn’t join them, and cellphones weren’t allowed inside. A few months earlier, when they had visited another New Jersey immigration jail, in Elizabeth, a guard wouldn’t admit them. Watson Coleman, who is eighty and in her sixth term, produced a copy of the federal statute that authorized their visit. Twenty minutes later, the warden and a representative from Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed them around. At Delaney Hall, McIver recalled, “I just thought we would go in and have a little delay.”

Delaney Hall, which is run by a private prison company called the GEO Group, was the first immigrant-detention center to open during Donald Trump’s second term. Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, a Democrat, claimed that the company had bypassed routine municipal permits and certifications in its rush to secure the federal contract, which was worth roughly a billion dollars over fifteen years. An Essex County court was adjudicating the dispute; the local news surrounding the case had prompted the representatives to make inquiries. “The Administration didn’t tell us this place was open and operating, so we didn’t have any information,” McIver said. “The only thing we could really do is show up and go there and see what was going on.” She had told Baraka to meet them afterward for the press conference, which would be held outside the facility’s perimeter fence.

What happened during the next two hours is the subject of a pending criminal case. A group of ICE agents came out through the front gate and began arresting Baraka for trespassing. McIver and Watson Coleman tried to stand between Baraka and the agents. “You’re touching a federal official,” McIver warned them. “Don’t touch us.” The agents ignored her and pressed in. There was shoving and jostling. The government later claimed that McIver, in trying to shield Baraka, “grabbed” and “slammed” one of the agents.

Baraka was eventually driven off in handcuffs and held for five hours before being released. Ten days later, Alina Habba, the acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, announced on X that the charges against him were being dropped. But, she wrote, “the dismissal against the mayor is not the end of this matter.” The second half of her statement addressed McIver. She was being charged with three felony counts of assaulting federal agents. If convicted, she faces seventeen years in prison.

Earlier in the year, as part of a new directive to increase immigration-related arrests, “special agents in charge” at F.B.I. offices across the country were encouraged to investigate and charge citizens and public officials if they “obstructed” immigration agents. According to an official in the Department of Justice, the order extended to judges and immigration lawyers whose rulings or legal advocacy, including on behalf of clients, ran counter to the Administration’s goals. “You’d never seen that before, because it was so extreme,” the official said. By the end of the year, the department had filed more than five hundred assault charges against people accused of interfering with federal law enforcement.

The prosecution of McIver was the first in a pattern of escalating attacks by the Trump Administration against Democratic officeholders. Nine days after she was charged, federal agents handcuffed a Democratic staffer in the office of the New York representative Jerrold Nadler, partially on the grounds that, after her colleagues documented their activity, she’d been “confrontational.” Two weeks later, Alex Padilla, a senator from California, was thrown to the ground by federal agents after walking into a Department of Homeland Security press conference in Los Angeles. “It’s all been very intentional,” Padilla told me. “Donald Trump came in with a list of political enemies that he wanted to punish. The list keeps growing.” Brad Lander, then the New York City comptroller, was arrested in June for obstructing immigration agents while accompanying an immigrant to court in lower Manhattan. In October, six people, including a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Illinois, were indicted for “hindering and impeding” ICE officers during a protest outside Chicago. At the start of December, ICE agents fired pepper spray at Adelita Grijalva, a newly sworn-in Democratic congresswoman, who was protesting an immigration raid in Tucson.

Many House Democrats have taken out personal-liability insurance to hedge against the prospect of being targeted by the President. “We’re freaking out,” one Democrat told me. “You do not know what’s coming around the next corner.” The Administration has claimed that McIver is “aligned” with Antifa. She was “out of control” at Delaney Hall, Trump said. “The days of woke are over.” Press releases issued by D.H.S. stated that she’d “stormed” the facility and “broken in”; on television, a department spokesperson accused McIver of “body-slamming” an agent. “No one else in Congress is facing what she’s facing,” Lateefah Simon, a Democratic representative from Oakland, California, said. “Typically, we would say, ‘Oh, they’re just trying to scare her.’ They’re actively litigating this case.” At one point, a federal judge ordered Justice Department lawyers to instruct Administration officials to stop lying publicly about the incident. “It’s not local ICE. It’s from headquarters in D.C.,” the government attorney replied. “We don’t have the authority.”

“I live a stone’s throw away from that big house on the corner with all the broken windows.”

Cartoon by Matthew Diffee

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

McIver’s case is expected to go to trial this year. By December, she had already racked up close to a million dollars in legal fees. Owing to House rules, the expenses have come out of her campaign funds, meaning that, in the months before her 2026 reëlection campaign, the money she’s raising will go almost exclusively toward her defense. “About five per cent of me regrets going that day,” she said. “Do I want to be hemmed up like this? My mom is worried to death. My husband’s stressed out. My nine-year-old is, like, ‘What the hell?’ ” But the government’s case, she went on, was meant “to slow me down and drain me of joy, and that’s why I’m so bent on it.”

On a blustery evening in October, I met McIver at her district office, in Newark. The government had shut down a week earlier, but a hum of activity remained. Staffers worked the phones from cubicles festooned with Halloween decorations. McIver, who is thirty-nine, with long dark hair and a ready smile, is personable and unguarded. She led me to a sparsely furnished conference room and offered me coffee and a snack. “I’m a mom,” she said. “Need to make sure everyone is fed.”

In May, during the week and a half between McIver’s visit to Delaney Hall and the D.O.J.’s indictment, Habba had proposed giving McIver probation in exchange for an apology. “I’m, like, ‘No, no, no, no,’ ” she told me. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Habba, who was in sporadic contact with McIver’s lawyers, then seemed to suggest that she might have McIver arrested—to choreograph a perp walk in front of news cameras. “They were not giving us any communication,” McIver said. “My husband was, like, ‘Don’t go anywhere by yourself.’ ”

When Habba announced the charges, McIver’s lawyers searched federal court records to examine the legal filing, but they couldn’t find one; it came later that night. “First Twitter, then the court filing,” McIver said. In the months since, the President’s taunts on social media have brought Fox News coverage, death threats, and a motion by House Republicans to censure McIver on the chamber floor. “It’s just honestly been super stressful,” she told me. One Republican representative told her that he found the crusade against her “crazy,” but she couldn’t share his name. “That would be the end of it for him,” she said.

McIver, the oldest of four children, grew up in public housing in the Central Ward of Newark. “We didn’t necessarily live in the projects, but we did see things that could be kind of disturbing,” she said. When she was a child, her mother struggled with substance abuse, and McIver lost several friends to shootings. Politics became an unlikely lifeline, for which she credits her fifth-grade teacher, Ras Baraka. For two decades, Baraka, the son of the poet Amiri Baraka, was a teacher and a high-school principal who moonlighted as a candidate for elective office. When McIver was in elementary school, Baraka ran for a seat on the Newark city council. His students passed out flyers and helped register voters. For McIver, the campaign’s atmosphere of resolve and sociability was intoxicating. It was also an unintended lesson in perseverance. “He probably went about fifteen or sixteen years of losing,” she told me.

McIver, who holds a master’s degree in education, was the first member of her family to attend college. She planned to be a teacher, until she learned that certification would require sixteen weeks of unpaid student teaching. “My mom was in rehab,” she said. “As a working student, that was not a situation for me.” By the time Baraka started rising through the ranks of city government, McIver was working in human resources for Newark’s public-school district. In 2012, she and a friend from one of Baraka’s city-council campaigns founded a small nonprofit to mentor girls in Newark.

McIver was thirty-two, and the mother of a toddler, when she decided to run for a council seat, in 2018. What immediately struck her was how old everyone in city government seemed. She made it something of a personal mission to, as she put it, “attract younger people—and when I say ‘young people’ I mean, like, under forty.” Within four years, she’d been chosen as the council president. By then, Baraka was starting his third term as mayor. He and McIver were now colleagues, sometimes with competing interests. “You don’t have to figure out where she stands on a position,” Baraka told me. “People knew that you can’t just say anything or treat her any kind of way. She’s going to respond.”

In 2024, Donald Payne, Jr., a U.S. congressman from New Jersey’s Tenth District, died suddenly, of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-five. He had been in the seat since 2012; his father had occupied it for twenty-three years before him. McIver beat ten other Democrats in the primary, then ran in a special election that was held in September, 2024, less than two months before the regularly scheduled election, in which she would have to run again. “I originally was, like, ‘Why are we having a special? Let’s just wait until November,’ ” she told me. But Democrats were trying to narrow the Republicans’ House majority. “They needed bodies,” she said.

McIver calls the four months she served in Congress that year her “orientation.” She inherited Payne’s role on the Homeland Security Committee, where she received an education in the chamber’s intractability: constant partisan warfare and zero possibility of legislating, especially during an all-consuming Presidential race. “It’s kind of shocking that it’s that bad,” she said. “Can’t we just do one good thing for the people we represent? Can we just have a conversation?”

McIver, outside Delaney Hall and flanked by fellow Congress members Bonnie Watson Coleman and Robert Menendez, Jr., demands the release of Ras Baraka, the mayor of Newark.Photograph by Dakota Santiago

McIver had sought a seat on the transportation committee—it was one of the least politicized, and her district included both a major train station and an international airport—but, since she held a reliably Democratic seat, Party leaders gave the slot to a “frontline” member facing a tighter race. Immigration, meanwhile, was at the center of Trump’s campaign, and within weeks of McIver’s swearing in one of her new colleagues on the Homeland Security Committee, Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican, caused a scandal by tweeting that Haitian migrants were “wild” and “slapstick gangsters” known for “eating pets.” McIver told me that Higgins, who would later lead the effort to censure her, was “really, really crazy. This man opens his mouth and I’m literally taken back to Jim Crow days.”

When Trump won, McIver told me, “I didn’t predict it would be this bad. I just didn’t think it would be so unhinged and rogue.” Trump had been in office for less than a week when ICE raided Ocean Seafood Depot, a wholesale fish market in Newark, arresting three people. The scale of the operation paled in comparison with the sweeping actions to come in cities including Chicago and Los Angeles, but it underscored for McIver, whose top priority as a campaigner had been the cost of living in Newark, that there’d be no outrunning Trump’s signature issue. “I didn’t come to Congress with a strong background on immigration,” she told me. “I came to Congress literally to do the job and work for people and protect them. It just so happens that, at the moment of me doing that, it happens to be around immigration.”

Delaney Hall is situated in a desolate corner of Newark, wedged between I-95 and the Passaic River. When I visited the site in October, accompanied by Nedia Morsy, the state director of Make the Road New Jersey, an immigrant-advocacy organization, the street out front, which is on a popular trucking route through the city, was thick with traffic. A half-dozen semis were parked on the shoulder, their drivers sleeping between shifts. In a small parking lot outside the perimeter fence, a dozen people sat on concrete slabs, waiting to visit detainees. The odor of burning garbage wafted from a nearby incineration plant. I could see the Essex County Correctional Facility, a much larger prison down the block. “It’s all here,” Morsy told me. “Environmental racism and immigration jails.”

When ICE announced its contract with the GEO Group, last February, the facility, which in the past had served as a halfway house, had been unoccupied for months. On March 28th, according to the city’s subsequent lawsuit, local officials began to notice that, though an occupancy permit had not been filed, the interior parking lot was full of vehicles. Three days later, city inspectors asked to come inside to confirm that the building was in compliance with fire and plumbing codes, and they were denied entry.

The GEO Group later claimed that the building’s new function as an immigration facility was roughly equivalent to its previous one, obviating any need for further inspection. The Trump Administration was rapidly expanding its detention capacity in anticipation of what the President was calling “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” The stock prices of private-prison companies were soaring. The GEO Group’s resistance to state inspectors was perhaps unsurprising, given the potential revenue at stake and the fact that the company could expect to receive the full backing of the federal government. New Jersey was also traditionally hostile territory. In 2021, the state had passed a law, which was later blocked in federal court, banning privately run immigration jails.

In April, Baraka, who had recently entered the Democratic primary for governor, learned at a staff meeting that inspectors were being turned away from Delaney Hall. “I said at the meeting, ‘Look, we all are going over there,’ ” he told me. “Nobody would let us in.” Later that month, as city lawyers sought an injunction to halt operations at Delaney Hall, Baraka started going to the facility every day. “We would stick a piece of paper on the gate, showing the violations,” he said. “Every morning, they would take them off.”

Morsy and a small group of activists held daily protest vigils outside the facility. “It was quiet as hell,” she told me. Baraka came “like clockwork.” Once relatives of detained immigrants began to show up at the gate, looking for their loved ones, she assumed that the facility had become operational. “We wanted our congressional delegation to conduct oversight,” Morsy said. “The Mayor could try to use codes and zoning ordinances. But that wasn’t really working.”

At the start of May, the number of armed guards at Delaney Hall began to increase. “It was getting bad,” Morsy said. She no longer felt comfortable encouraging her group’s members to go to the vigils. On May 7th, two days before the congressional visit, Morsy realized that most of the guards were wearing masks. Many of them also carried zip ties. She began to worry for the Mayor’s safety. “It was totally isolated,” she said, of the facility’s location. “I knew something was going to happen.”

None of the representatives were surprised when, on May 9th, the GEO contractor manning the front gate at Delaney Hall refused, at first, to let them in. The GEO Group employees, Representative Menendez told me, were “less clued in” to the protocol for congressional tours than D.H.S. officials were; the members knew that they’d need to speak with someone from the government to start the process. Eventually, a car drove up to the entrance. When the guard opened the gate, Watson Coleman, wearing a beige trenchcoat, rushed in behind it. McIver and Menendez followed.

A man in a suit, who worked for the GEO Group, came over with an ICE official. They all shook hands. McIver already knew the official from ICE. In March, she and Menendez had met with him and another agency staffer at ICE’s New Jersey field office, in Newark, to discuss their plans for touring facilities under the new Administration. The official had been cordial and suggested that the agency would coöperate with congressional oversight. “Good to see you again,” McIver told him.

Around one-thirty, the three representatives were led into a waiting area in a security checkpoint with chairs and a metal detector. A third man, in a checkered blazer and a fedora, introduced himself as the warden. He was cheerful but evasive, telling the members that he’d have to call his “client”—ICE—for authorization. An ICE agent with a body camera stood across from them, recording everything and occasionally fielding questions. “We knew we were getting stalled,” Watson Coleman later told me.

At one point, the official whom McIver knew took the agent aside, out of earshot of the representatives, and asked, “So they forced themselves in, right?” The agent replied, “They moved the GEO guard aside. They pushed him.” This was plainly inaccurate, according to security-camera footage. But a D.H.S. statement published later that day alleged that “a group of protestors, including two members of the U.S. House of Representatives, stormed the gate and broke into the detention facility.”

Cartoon by Mick Stevens

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

In the waiting room, meanwhile, McIver was growing frustrated. After about fifteen minutes, when the ICE official stepped outside, she followed him to the door. “We’re not just going to be sitting here all day while they play games,” she said. “I’m not in the mood for that.” A few minutes later, McIver and the official returned; she was in the middle of berating him. “Don’t tell me to relax,” she said. “Trust me, Trump is not going to be the President forever. Remember that.”

Just after two-thirty, a group of ICE officers entered the waiting area. One of them, a woman in a windbreaker emblazoned with “HSI,” for Homeland Security Investigations, was an ICE supervisor from the agency’s offices in downtown Newark. She asked the representatives how they were doing. “I was better about an hour ago,” Watson Coleman said. McIver added, “We had a rough time, but it’s getting better.” Another ICE officer, Ricky Patel, a broad-shouldered bald man in bluejeans, was speaking on a cellphone. He was the top-ranking agent at the facility, in charge of ICE’s field office in New Jersey. His attention was not on the representatives but on the parking lot.

Ras Baraka had already been to Delaney Hall that morning. He had left to take his kids to school and to go to the gym. “I actually almost forgot about” the press conference that afternoon, he told me. He arrived at Delaney Hall shortly before two, on the assumption that the representatives would be finishing their tour. A group of protesters were chanting out front, and, when he walked up to the gate, the GEO contractor said something about calming the crowd and let him in. Two armed bodyguards—the Mayor’s usual security detail—were with him. “I was waiting for them to come out,” Baraka said, of the representatives. “I had no intention of going inside.”

Now Patel and the other agents came over to confront him. “This is private property,” Patel told him. “There’s a sign that says ‘No Trespassing.’ ” Baraka replied, “We got invited in,” adding that he planned to leave with the representatives when they finished their tour. “You’re not a congressman,” Patel told him. A moment later, McIver, Menendez, and Watson Coleman joined the group. In a calm but firm voice, Patel told Baraka that he’d be arrested if he didn’t leave.

When the representatives realized what was happening, they were furious. “You are creating a problem that doesn’t exist,” Watson Coleman told Patel. She and Menendez were raising their voices. “This is an act of intimidation and you know it,” Menendez said. A demonstrator on the other side of the gate shouted, “You let him in, you piece of shit!”

Patel took out handcuffs and stepped toward Baraka. “You must be out your damn minds,” McIver shouted. “Hell no! Hell no!” She and Watson Coleman gathered around Baraka, putting themselves between him and the agents. Baraka finally relented and started toward the gate. Watson Coleman held his arm. “The Mayor is ready to go out,” she said.

Several ICE agents were wearing body cameras that afternoon. Multiple videos released as part of McIver’s legal case show a scene of palpable relief once Baraka went through the gate. McIver and the other members walked back to the waiting room. Two agents, who had begun loading pepper balls into rifles, put their weapons into the trunk of a black Ford S.U.V. “It got tense there for a second,” one of them said.

Patel and a half-dozen other agents remained by the front gate. He was on the phone—it wasn’t yet clear with whom. “No problem,” he said. “I’m going to take him right now.” He hung up and turned to the other agents, telling them that he had just received an order from the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, Todd Blanche. “We’re going to walk out of the gates,” he said. “I’m going to place the Mayor in handcuffs.”

The agents took a minute to prepare themselves. McIver, who was dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and a red blazer, which she’d worn to the maternity ward that morning, was near the building’s entrance. “Next thing we know, we see these people running back to the gate,” she told me. “We’re, like, ‘What’s going on now?’ ”

The three representatives reached the gate just before Patel and the agents exited. They all converged on Baraka at the same time. The decision to arrest him in the facility’s front parking lot, which is public property, meant that there was now a large crowd to contend with—protesters, press, congressional staff members. Two agents threw a protester at the edge of the scrum to the ground.

Baraka had told his bodyguards to step aside when the agents came to make the arrest. “I can handle myself,” he said. The bodyguards stood back and demanded to speak with the person in charge. The only thing that Baraka could hear, he told me later, was staffers shouting at the agents not to touch the congresspeople. The agents, he said, “were very, very rough.” In his periphery, he saw them with their guns drawn, “grabbing and pulling” some of the protesters. “My mind was all over the place,” he said. “I heard somebody”—an agent—“say, ‘Take them to the ground, take them to ground.’ ”

McIver and Menendez were trying both to keep the agents from swarming Baraka and to make sure that Watson Coleman didn’t fall. The younger representatives told me later that they felt an almost filial impulse to protect her from injury. “People were shoving and pushing us, and it was becoming very dangerous,” McIver told me. “I was screaming out repeatedly, ‘Please get your hands off of us. Do not touch us.’ ” She went on, “It wasn’t clear if these folks knew who we were. There was a man with a gun. I mean, it was crazy.”

When the government announced the charges against McIver, it zeroed in on four frames from one agent’s body-cam footage which show her making contact with Patel, who is identified as Victim 1, or V-1. The images are, at best, ambiguous. According to the indictment, McIver was trying to “thwart the arrest,” and, in the process, “slammed her forearm into the body of V-1” and “also reached out and tried to restrain V-1 by forcibly grabbing him.” McIver was trying to keep Baraka from being arrested, but the agents were initiating much of the contact. One of her staffers noted that her red blazer, which stood out in the blur of dark uniforms, may have made it easier for them to isolate images of her in the skirmish.

Two of the agents, including Patel, led Baraka inside the gate to a waiting car, while the other agents shoved away bystanders. McIver tried to get back inside, but an agent in fatigues and a mask blocked her path. He pushed her hard in the stomach. McIver pushed him back. Menendez wrapped his arms around McIver and pulled her inside the gate. The agent walked briskly to the back of the black Ford S.U.V. and took out a gun filled with pepper balls. “He just assaulted me,” McIver shouted. “I’m filing a complaint.” When he emerged from behind the vehicle, McIver confronted him. The recording didn’t capture their entire exchange. In her account, he told her, “Fuck you. I don’t give a fuck.”

In the indictment, he is called Victim 2. A still image shows McIver’s left forearm on his back and his elbow in her stomach. “If they’re saying LaMonica pushed a federal officer, then, without a doubt, those same charges can be brought against federal officers for pushing a member of Congress,” Menendez told me. McIver was visibly shaking, but almost three hours after arriving the three representatives finally went on the tour.

Before Alina Habba became the acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, this past March, she worked in private practice in the township of Bedminster. Her career was distinguished by her loyalty to her most prominent client, the then former President, whom she began representing in 2021 and whose golf club in Bedminster she was a member of. One case, which led to an ethics complaint against Habba, involved a club employee who alleged being sexually harassed at work. In another, Habba, who is forty-one, defended Trump against a lawsuit filed by a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” who alleged that Trump had sexually assaulted her. As a member of the defense team in the writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case against Trump, in 2023, Habba was frequently chastised by the judge for her apparent confusion in matters of routine courtroom procedure. “We are going to take a break here,” the judge told her at one point. “You’re going to refresh your memory about how you get a document into evidence.”

Even as a federal prosecutor, Habba was clear about her partisan commitments. “We could turn New Jersey red,” she told Jack Posobiec, a far-right influencer, during an interview in March. “I can help that cause.” One of her first public acts was to join a team of U.S. Marshals as they arrested fugitives, which she later posted about on social media. “She basically made herself into a witness in that case,” a lawyer in the office at the time told me. “People were concerned about being asked to do cases with her.” According to three current and former Justice Department lawyers, Habba had a list of state Democrats she aimed to investigate, including Phil Murphy, the former governor; Cory Booker, a senator; and Baraka.

Twenty minutes after Baraka was arrested, Habba made an announcement on X that said the Mayor had “willingly chosen to disregard the law.” She later gave an interview to Fox News in which she claimed, inaccurately, that he “was put under arrest inside the facility.” Baraka would go on to sue Habba for defamation, but by then she’d already seemed to realize that the government’s case against him was too weak to prosecute.

At a hearing two days after the government dropped its charges against Baraka, the judge upbraided Stephen Demanovich, a federal prosecutor who had been assigned the case. “An arrest, particularly of a public figure, is not a preliminary investigative tool,” the judge said. “Let this incident serve as an inflection point.” The admonition proved persuasive. Demanovich, who arrived in the office shortly after Habba took over, had been commuting to New Jersey each week from his home in Florida. He was a mystery to his colleagues, who referred to him as “Florida man.” After the hearing, “he left the office without a whisper,” one of them told me. “We never heard from him again.”

For half a century, the Justice Department had strict instructions, laid out in a manual, for how its staff investigated members of Congress. The main requirement was for prosecutors to seek “prior approval” from an office called the Public Integrity Section, which came into existence after Watergate, to insure that charges weren’t politically motivated. A week before McIver was charged, the Justice Department suspended the rule. The move came amid a welter of changes to the section, according to an investigation by Reuters. By June, the number of lawyers in it had been reduced from more than thirty to five. The department official told me, “Public-corruption prosecutors at U.S. Attorneys’ offices across the country, along with their F.B.I. partners, are now spending more of their time working on violent crime and immigration cases.”

The case against McIver was more promising for the government than the one against Baraka. Habba’s office had spent hours reviewing the footage to build an argument. Of the three representatives, McIver was visibly the most upset, and she didn’t hesitate to join the fray. Even some House Democrats—already skittish when it came to the politics of immigration—were uneasy about the optics. “The Newark case is messy,” one of them told me. “If you give the Administration something, they’ll take it.” In June, a federal grand jury indicted McIver on three counts of “assaulting, resisting, impeding and interfering” with government agents.

I recently asked a lawyer who had worked at the Public Integrity Section whether the indictment seemed solid. “I don’t see there being a viable case at all,” the lawyer said. McIver had been at Delaney Hall for an official legislative function, and the officers themselves had seemed to cause “chaos and mass confusion.” Ultimately, the lawyer said, “it matters that she’s a congressperson. These cases get a lot more attention, and they have much broader implications when you’re dragging a congressperson into court for hearings. We never would have pursued this.”

In the summer, Habba faced a reckoning of her own. Nominated by Trump but unconfirmed by the Senate, she had been serving for an interim period of a hundred and twenty days when federal district-court judges in the state determined that she could no longer legally remain in the post. The ruling was widely expected. On July 17th, a few days before it was issued, Habba convened a meeting on the seventh floor of the Newark office. At a podium in front of an American flag, she tearfully told her staff that she’d enjoyed working in public service. “It was a bunch of bromides and puffery,” one of the attendees told me. “No one took her at face value. We knew she was staying.”

On July 22nd, the morning of the ruling, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court of New Jersey called Habba with the news that the panel had chosen her deputy, Desiree Grace, as her replacement. Habba, who spoke on a regular basis to Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General, and Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, closed the door to her office and made a series of phone calls. People working on the floor heard her screaming into the receiver. At five o’clock that evening, Grace’s work phone went dead. She’d been fired. “It was assumed that Alina did that,” the attendee said.

Habba remained in the post, but in August another federal judge ruled that she was “not lawfully holding the office.” The decision had immediate implications for a number of cases. One judge on the verge of issuing a criminal sentence postponed her ruling indefinitely, on the basis that Habba now lacked the legal authority to represent the government. The Trump Administration had tried a convoluted strategy so that Habba could continue to bring cases: it withdrew her nomination, named her as a “special attorney,” appointed her to Grace’s previous position as deputy, and then elevated her to acting U.S. Attorney to fill the new vacancy. But, on December 8th, a week after an appeals court once again ruled against her, Habba resigned. She announced that she was leaving the office to serve as an adviser to Bondi. “Do not mistake compliance for surrender,” Habba wrote on X.

For McIver, the news didn’t change much. Habba had secured the indictment before her provisional term expired. To hedge against any lingering questions about Habba’s authority, the government had, for months, added a second name next to Habba’s on the signature block of its court filings. It was that of Todd Blanche, who had ordered the arrest that set McIver’s prosecution in motion.

At the start of Trump’s second term, Blanche, a fifty-year-old former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, was thought to have the potential to be a moderating influence inside the Justice Department. His personal background was atypical of the élite legal circles in which he rose. As a young father of two children, he commuted from Long Island to New York City to be a paralegal in the U.S. Attorney’s office and went to law school at night. “We called him Wonder Boy,” one of his former colleagues told me. “He was never the smartest guy in the room or the best writer. But people wanted to work with him.”

Blanche eventually entered private practice and became a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, the oldest white-shoe firm in the city. His clients included Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who was convicted of fraud and faced additional charges, and Boris Epshteyn, one of the President’s top advisers, who was accused of interfering with the 2020 election. “He would sit in the dining room at Mar-a-Lago and pick up clients,” a former colleague at the firm told me. Other Cadwalader lawyers may have personally disliked some of the figures on Blanche’s client list, but they considered him a “good firm citizen,” someone who was collegial, approachable, and generous with his time.

That changed in 2023, when Blanche told the firm’s other partners that he wanted to defend Trump, who had been indicted in Manhattan for falsifying business records. “He genuinely believed that the prosecution of Trump was politically motivated,” a source with knowledge of the firm told me. The partners felt that, after the riot at the Capitol on January 6th, representing Trump would hurt the firm’s reputation. They were also concerned that Trump, who was notorious for mistreating his lawyers, wouldn’t pay his legal fees. The partners wouldn’t allow Blanche to retain Trump as a Cadwalader client, and Blanche said he would leave the firm. “Todd was, like, ‘I’m doing this,’ ” the source with knowledge of the firm told me. “It was a difficult decision. They liked the guy. The firm was reluctant to let him go.”

During Trump’s trial, Blanche seemed to undergo a conversion. He moved to Florida and adopted a bellicose persona in court and in the media. “I don’t recognize him,” the former colleague at the firm told me. “Todd’s only hope after that trial was to go into government.” Many assumed that he was angling for an appointment as the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. Instead, when Trump returned to office, Blanche secured a higher perch—the No. 2 post at the Justice Department.

Last winter, Trump issued a series of executive orders and memorandums that punished prominent law firms with ties to people or causes that the President felt were opposed to him. Rather than fight the action in court, the managing partners at Paul, Weiss, a marquee New York law firm, decided to strike a deal with the White House. The firm agreed to devote forty million dollars’ worth of pro-bono services to causes approved by the President. This set off a cascade of similar deals, with the Administration raising the price in each subsequent negotiation. The next firm to settle, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, agreed to a figure of a hundred million dollars. The third, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, was initially told that the demand would be a hundred and twenty-five million dollars.

“If you’re watching this tape, it can mean only one thing—you need to upgrade your home-entertainment system.”

Cartoon by Brendan Loper

Copy link to cartoon

Link copied

Shop

In the spring, the partners at Cadwalader heard a rumor that they were next in the Administration’s crosshairs—a shock, given the firm’s past ties to people in Trump’s inner circle. Douglas Gansler, a senior lawyer, called Epshteyn, who was the President’s de-facto representative in negotiations with the law firms. Paul, Weiss has an annual budget of roughly a hundred and seventy-five million dollars for pro-bono work; Cadwalader’s, by contrast, was between five and seven million dollars. Epshteyn told Gansler that to avoid punishment the firm would have to agree to the going rate—a hundred million dollars to litigate causes aligned with the President’s agenda. The impression at Cadwalader had been that the split with Blanche was amicable. “This was how we learned that Todd felt bitter about the decision,” the source with knowledge of the firm told me. “It was a slap in the face from Todd.”

As Deputy Attorney General, Blanche has gone to special lengths to defend the President. In July, he met with the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, reportedly in an effort to blunt the political fallout from Trump’s reluctance to release the government’s files on Maxwell’s benefactor, Jeffrey Epstein. But Blanche has more frequently gone on the offensive to advance the President’s principal obsessions: enforcing immigration laws and pursuing his political opponents. On March 6th, D.O.J. employees received a memo from Blanche with the subject “Operation Take Back America.” The goal, he wrote, was to “surge existing resources” to fulfill Trump’s agenda of “stopping illegal immigration,” “eliminating Cartels,” and “ending illegal trafficking of dangerous drugs and human beings.” In practice, this meant “responding and investigating instances of obstruction in sanctuary jurisdictions.”

That same week, the Administration began transferring Venezuelan migrants accused of belonging to the gang Tren de Aragua to ICE detention centers in Texas, in preparation for their eventual rendition to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. According to a subsequent court declaration by Emil Bove, who at the time worked directly under Blanche (before Trump appointed him to an appellate-court judgeship), Blanche was involved in privileged discussions “regarding the transfer of custody of aliens who had been detained pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act and removed from the United States.” The government deported more than a hundred of the migrants in clear violation of a federal judge’s injunction. With some of them on a plane was Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran who was deported as a result of an administrative error. When a veteran department attorney presenting the case to a judge admitted that the deportation was a mistake, Blanche suspended him for “engaging in conduct prejudicial to your client.”

Blanche has seemed most comfortable vilifying Trump’s critics. Last September, he told CNN that a group of women who protested Trump while he dined at a Washington restaurant could be charged under the RICO Act, a law typically used against gangs and organized crime. The following month, Blanche published a letter threatening to prosecute California officials who advocated the idea of arresting immigration agents who broke state laws during raids. (Agents, he wrote, could not be charged with state crimes if they were performing their federal duties.) At an event for the Federalist Society, in November, he lashed out at judges who ruled against the Administration, saying that the country was “at war.”

On the afternoon of June 12th, a protest erupted inside Delaney Hall. The detainees had been complaining about conditions at the facility for days. Because of overcrowding, some of them were sleeping on the ground. Their meals, which came intermittently, sometimes consisted of just a few slices of bread. On the upper floor of the facility, several dozen men started covering up security cameras and breaking windows. A Salvadoran woman told the Times that, just before 6 P.M., she received a panicked call from her brother, who was being detained at Delaney Hall: “He told me he was scared and didn’t know what would happen to him.” An emergency immigration hotline took a call from Delaney Hall in which the operator heard screams in the background. Four men escaped the facility by tearing down one of the building’s walls.

McIver was on a train from Washington to Newark when she got the news. She’d been indicted two days earlier and had just appeared on MSNBC to discuss her case. “I expect bad news all the time from these places,” McIver told me, in reference to ICE detention centers. “But I knew something would happen at Delaney.” When she and the other representatives had toured the facility, they noticed certain irregularities. The phones weren’t working, and they got stuck in an elevator. It was lunchtime, but the kitchen was empty. “You didn’t even have a sniff of food,” McIver told me. At the Elizabeth detention center, the representatives had been given hairnets when they walked through the kitchen, where cooks were preparing meals. “We didn’t have any of that at Delaney,” she told me. “No one was there.”

By the summer, with the White House pressuring ICE to arrest some three thousand people a day, the population in detention nationwide was growing. There were some fifty-six thousand people in more than a hundred and thirty facilities that, together, were designed to hold forty-one thousand people. Conditions at many of the detention centers were rapidly deteriorating.

In Miami, underfed detainees described being denied medical treatment. One morning in June, a group of them gathered in the yard to spell out a human sign that said “SOS.” Twenty-seven women were forced into a small holding cell after spending hours cuffed and chained on a bus where guards refused to give them food, water, or access to a toilet, according to USA Today; they were told to urinate on the floor. Immigrants who’d been arrested at routine ICE check-ins in Los Angeles were kept overnight in the basement of a federal building. In New York, a Peruvian immigrant filed a lawsuit over mistreatment at 26 Federal Plaza, where ICE has held about half of the two thousand people it’s detained in the city since January. Dozens of men were crammed into a two-hundred-and-fifteen-square-foot cell; one of them lost twenty-four pounds while in custody. A common concern, reported by detainees held across the country, was that they were not allowed to speak to lawyers or family members, rendering them almost completely cut off from the outside world.

The experience of McIver, Watson Coleman, and Menendez in May was the harbinger of a policy shift at ICE. In the summer, twelve Democratic representatives from six other states were blocked when they showed up at detention centers for unannounced visits. The agency offered a range of explanations. In mid-June, on its website, ICE said that, though members could visit detention centers where immigrants were held for prolonged periods of time, they couldn’t tour field offices that weren’t designed for long-term confinement. Yet in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, ICE was using field offices as de-facto jails. The agency then stipulated that members of Congress were required to inform the government a week before attempting a visit. On July 30th, a group of Democrats sued the Administration, seeking to get the policy overturned.

One of the plaintiffs in that case is Jason Crow, a forty-six-year-old combat veteran from Colorado who’s currently in his fourth term in the House. The Denver Contract Detention Facility, a jail run by the GEO Group, is in his district, which spans parts of Denver and the neighboring city of Aurora. On July 20th, he showed up for a tour and, after waiting an hour, was turned away. Several weeks later, when one of Crow’s staffers went to the facility, following a different but related set of protocols, two conservative members of the Aurora City Council accosted him. One of them recorded a video of the interaction on his phone, while the other yelled that the staffer was “here to meet with criminals.”

The treatment was especially striking to Crow because he had helped make unannounced visits a legally protected part of the congressional appropriations process. Like McIver, he didn’t have a background in immigration policy. “I’m not a likely ally for this issue,” he told me. “I’m a working-class military veteran from the Upper Midwest.” He was struck, however, by the degree to which immigration jails were unregulated compared with facilities that held U.S. citizens. In 2019, as a freshman House member, he created an inspection checklist based on national detention standards. That February, Congress added a provision to its annual appropriation bill which codified the members’ right to make in-person visits to facilities where children were being held by the government; at the end of the year, Congress inserted a rider into the funding bill which allowed them to visit any facilities detaining immigrants.

The language of the bill was unequivocal on one point: representatives would never be required to provide “prior notice” of their visits. That year, members of the Homeland Security Committee published a report describing how ICE officials had “used the advanced warning to improve the conditions.” They observed fresh paint, cleaning supplies, the assignment of new guards, and the transfer of detainees from solitary confinement to the general population. Crow himself went on to make ten oversight visits; his staff conducted close to ninety. The incident at the Aurora facility in July, according to the lawsuit, represented “the first time since he began conducting oversight visits in February 2019” that he “was denied in his attempt to visit” the detention center in his district. “They know right now under this Administration that they’re untouchable,” Crow said of ICE. “There’s nothing they can do that’s going to get them in trouble with Trump and his minions . . . but they can’t hide behind their masks forever.”

On December 5th, McIver and I met for lunch at Swahili Village, a restaurant in Newark. It was late on a Friday afternoon and there were no other diners. McIver, dressed in jeans and a green sweater with matching glasses, seemed tired but relaxed. Constituents often expressed their appreciation to her for standing up to the Administration, but she regretted that, in the images most had seen of her, she was frozen in a moment of anger. “I want to be presentable all the time,” she told me. “I don’t want people to see me in the light of having to be like that.”

In October, during oral arguments, McIver’s legal team had tried to get the judge to dismiss the charges, on the grounds that the Justice Department had engaged in “selective” and “vindictive” prosecution and that she had legislative immunity. “It is all about politics and partisanship,” McIver’s lawyers had written in their brief. During the hearing, McIver, who had never been to court before, looked slightly stunned; afterward, on the courtroom steps, she addressed a crowd of supporters, while her mother, her husband, and two of her sisters stood nearby. “I want to be clear to everyone,” she said. “This process has not stopped me from doing my job.” Three weeks later, the judge rejected her legal team’s arguments, allowing the case to go to trial.

Knowing what she knows now, McIver said, she would still have gone to Delaney Hall in May. But she allowed that “maybe I should not have been so vocal there. Maybe I should have, you know, shut my ass up, not been yelling and telling them how they were wrong.” She noted that Watson Coleman, who’d stood next to her during the altercation, hadn’t been charged with impeding the agents. One explanation was that Watson Coleman, at eighty, wasn’t as imposing. But she’d also been more measured than McIver. “Is it because she wasn’t as loud as me?” McIver said. “Like, she didn’t use as many curse words?” McIver told me that, when such doubts creep in, she tells herself, “You were supposed to be there. You were supposed to go there.”

McIver and her legal team are appealing the judge’s ruling, arguing that her case for legislative immunity should carry more weight. There are compelling legal arguments for this. Josh Chafetz, a professor at Georgetown Law, told me, “Oversight of ICE would include monitoring their conduct outside the gates of Delaney Hall when they tried to arrest the Mayor.” McIver noted that the agent who pushed her on May 9th “knew who we were. We were just in there.” She went on, “The only reason we were outside the fucking gate is because they would not give us a tour.”

As a Black woman, she felt that the suggestion that she hadn’t been doing her job in May was like being told she didn’t deserve the job. “It brought me back to a different time, a time before the civil-rights movement,” she said. “It was racism. It was lack of respect.” (The morning of the incident, the agent who shoved McIver “used a racial slur to refer to African Americans” in a text message sent to the other agents at the facility, according to a recent court filing by McIver’s lawyers, who’ve seen the messages; for now the texts are under seal by the district court.)

Legislative immunity was also important to her because, without it, the Administration could punish her even in the absence of a trial. Her campaign was running out of money; the government’s prosecutorial resources were infinite. “It’s all about tearing down a Democratic member of Congress,” she said. “It’s about embarrassing, bullying, intimidating so that everyone can watch.” McIver began to tear up. “They probably thought, No one’s gonna fucking pay attention to her. This is great. Let’s use her as an example.”

Two weeks later, ICE announced that Jean Wilson Brutus, a forty-one-year-old Haitian detained at Delaney Hall, had died while in custody. In a press release, the government called his cause of death “a medical emergency.” He was one of thirty-two people who died in ICE custody in 2025, making it the deadliest year in more than two decades for immigrants in detention.

McIver called me a few nights later, sounding both outraged and resolved. The next morning, she told me, she was planning on returning to Delaney Hall, joined by Menendez and Yvette Clarke, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. This time, McIver had alerted ICE in advance, though she was not required to do so; in mid-December, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled in favor of the congressional Democrats who had sued the agency, finding that ICE couldn’t block unannounced visits. (On January 8th, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, disregarding the ruling, banned such visits once again.) “My thing is not to hate these people,” McIver said. “I want to have a working relationship.”

The morning of December 23rd was cold and raw. An early snow had turned to rain and sleet by nine o’clock, when McIver arrived at Delaney Hall, in a black Suburban. A small group of protesters and journalists stood out front, but none of them seemed to notice her. The Suburban rolled up to the gate, where a GEO employee waved her inside. She emerged, three hours later, with Menendez and Clarke, for a press conference—an uncanny parallel to the visit in May.

Afterward, I rode with her back to her office in Newark. The officials at the jail wouldn’t address Brutus’s death, but McIver and the others had been able to interview about twenty detainees. “When we told them about the man who died, they didn’t even know,” she said. One of them started to cry. A Venezuelan woman told McIver that, weeks before, out of desperation to leave U.S. custody, she’d signed a so-called voluntary-departure order. Inexplicably, she’d been transferred to another facility, in Louisiana, then returned to Delaney Hall.

McIver’s fiery, sometimes combative public persona was gone; in its place was the heavy-lidded look of someone overwhelmed by what she’d just witnessed. “The one thing, in addition to sadness and depression and disappointment, was the whole idea that all of these people were Black and brown,” she said. “I didn’t go talk to anybody from Europe.” She met a family from Toms River, New Jersey—a mother, son, and daughter who’d been living in the U.S. for twelve years when they were arrested by ICE. The daughter, who’d recently turned eighteen, was a senior in high school. A Nigerian man inside was married to a member of the U.S. Navy. Many of the detainees she spoke with had valid work authorizations, but they’d been apprehended anyway, after showing up for seemingly routine appointments at immigration court.

When I asked McIver about her ICE chaperon inside the jail, her usual sharpness returned. He had chided her and the other lawmakers for showing up late. “We’re members of Congress,” she told me. “We’re approving a budget for you to be employed. But you’re talking to us like we work for you.” She sighed. “That was the behavior we got. But, once again, I was expecting that, so I told the man, ‘Have a Merry Christmas.’ ” ♦